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A friendly place to share small business ideas and knowledge, ask questions, find help and encourage others that are involved in the small business industry. Topics include small business marketing, generating revenue and small business computing.

1) The article must be good quality and contribute to the community. Moderators will be free to remove any articles posted for any reason.

2) Do not post the entire article.

-- Include a small quote from the article
-- Include a link to the article
-- Include your own comments and thoughts regarding the article.

3) Any article threads that have not received any responses/comments/conversation may be removed. Typically this will be reviewed on a weekly basis. If no other members have taken an interest in the article it will be removed.
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Remember, this is a test run. So please feel free to give us any feedback here. My own opinion is that this has very little to do with 'articles' and more to do with quality of the content. I believe if we can keep the quality up, allowing members to discuss various articles online is a good thing.

Rule # 2 -- Include your own comments and thoughts regarding the article.
I think this may be often overlooked. The article is viewed as their opinion, own comments and thoughts. Perhaps requiring an engaging question after the links if no additional comments are made.

Rule # 2 -- Include your own comments and thoughts regarding the article.
I think this may be often overlooked. The article is viewed as their opinion, own comments and thoughts. Perhaps requiring an engaging question after the links if no additional comments are made.

Dan

True. Not so much overlooked, but good intentions to start without follow through on my part.

I think we can require that moving forward, and subsequently see if it does increase activity with threads that are based on articles. Thanks!!

I'll try to (nicely) crack the whip a bit with that. Where is that whip ...

In the past we have not allowed a lot of threads which were referring to online articles and blog posts from other sites. We are going to change this up a bit, and do a test run to see how it goes.

You can now post articles within the forum. There are a couple qualifications we will be initially putting in place to see how it goes -

1) The article must be good quality and contribute to the community. Moderators will be free to remove any articles posted for any reason.

2) Do not post the entire article.

-- Include a small quote from the article
-- Include a link to the article
-- Include your own comments and thoughts regarding the article.

3) Any article threads that have not received any responses/comments/conversation may be removed. Typically this will be reviewed on a weekly basis. If no other members have taken an interest in the article it will be removed.

An example, a current thread about an article that we consider to be of good quality is here -

Remember, this is a test run. So please feel free to give us any feedback here. My own opinion is that this has very little to do with 'articles' and more to do with quality of the content. I believe if we can keep the quality up, allowing members to discuss various articles online is a good thing.

I didn`t understand what articles do you mean? For article exchange? Or just article with interesting material?

It has been a while since the original post was posted, and some time since I commented negatively. I notice that the policy change has remained in place and that we have covered enough ground to see whether it has benefited the forum or not.

I feel it has not benefited the forum. Fortunately, not many people have taken up the opportunity of posting a link to their articles, so any success must be muted. But, Likewise, negative effect must be muted, too. IOW - it's a wash!